Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  HOME IS MY HOTEL

  I look around and take each thing in again. I look at it from scratch, like I’ve never been here before. I discover details. I am particularly struck by the hotel owners’ attention to the flowers – they’re so big and pretty, with their luminous leaves, and their appropriately moist dirt, and that tetrastigma: impressive.

  What a big bedroom, although the sheets could be better quality, white and well starched linen. Instead they’re the colour of faded bark, such that they require neither pressing nor ironing. The library downstairs, though, is actually terrific – it’s exactly the kind of stuff I like, and it has everything I would need if I ever had to live here. In fact, I may end up staying longer just because of those books.

  And by some strange coincidence I find some clothes in the closet that fit me perfectly, mostly dark colours, which is what I like to wear. They fit me perfectly – that black hoodie, so soft and so comfortable. And – and this is now beginning to be truly incredible – there on the nightstand are my vitamins and the earplugs I always buy. This is really too much. I also like that you never see any of your hosts, that there is no housekeeping staff here in the mornings pounding down your door. That there isn’t anybody wandering around. There’s no reception. I even make my own coffee in the mornings myself, just the way I like it. On the espresso machine, with steamed milk.

  Indeed, it is a good hotel with good rates, this one, perhaps a little bit in the middle of nowhere, and some distance from the main road, which in the winter gets buried in snow, but if one is travelling by car, it doesn’t really matter. You have to get off the motorway at the town of S. and go a few kilometres more along a regular road and then turn at G. onto a chestnut-lined avenue that leads to a gravel road. In the winter you have to leave your car by the last hydrant and walk the rest of the way.

  TRAVEL PSYCHOLOGY: LECTIO BREVIS II

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ began the woman, this time quite young, wearing army boots, her hair pinned up in a way I found amusing; she must have been fresh out of her master’s programme. ‘As we have said in previous lectures – which perhaps you have had a chance to listen to at one of the airports or train stations participating in this project – we experience time and space in a manner that is primarily unconscious. These are not categories we could call objective, or external. Our sense of space results from our ability to move. Our sense of time, meanwhile, is due to being biological individuals undergoing distinct and changing states. Time is thus nothing other than the flow of changes.

  ‘Place as an aspect of space pauses time. It is the momentary detainment of our perception on a configuration of objects. It is, in contradistinction to time, a static notion.

  ‘Understood thus, human time is divided into stages, as movement through space is broken up by place-pauses. Such pauses anchor us within the flow of time. A person who is sleeping and loses any sense of the place in which he or she currently is also loses all sense of time. The more pauses in space, and the more places we experience therefore, the more time elapses subjectively. We often refer to separate stages of time as episodes. They have no consequences, interrupting time without becoming part of it. They are self-contained occurrences, each starting from scratch; each beginning and each end is absolute. Not a single episode is to be continued, you might say.’

  By now there was some movement in the first row, as in the murmuring of the announcements about passengers urgently requested someone here had recognized their name and was hurrying to gather carry-ons and duty-free sacks, jostling past their neighbours in that scramble. In a panic I checked my own boarding pass again, losing the thread of the lecture; it was a struggle to get back into this woman’s disquisition as she now embarked upon travel psychology’s practical side. She must have sensed we’d had enough of the strange and complicated theory.

  ‘Practical travel psychology investigates the metaphorical meaning of places. Just take a look at those screens with destinations on them. Have you ever stopped to think about what “Iceland” means? And what are the “United States”? What sort of response do you find within yourself when you pronounce those names? Asking yourself this type of question is particularly helpful in topographical psychoanalysis, where getting to the deeper meaning of places leads to deciphering the so-called itinerarium – the particular route of the traveller, that is, the deeper reason for his journey.

  ‘Topographical or travel psychoanalysis does not, despite surface similarities, pose the same question as immigration officials: what did you come here for? Our question raises issues of sense and meaning. In essence, one becomes what one participates in. In other words, I am what I look at.

  ‘And this was of course the reason behind the ancient pilgrimages. Striving towards – and reaching – a holy place would bestow holiness upon us, cleanse us of our sins. Does the same thing happen when we travel to unholy, sinful places? To sad and vacant places? Joyful, fruitful places?

  ‘And is it not so…’ continued the woman, but behind me two middle-aged couples were chatting in hushed voices, which for a moment seemed more interesting to me than the reflections of our lecturer.

  I worked out quickly that it was two married couples exchanging impressions from their travels, one couple urging the other:

  ‘You have to go to Cuba – but the Cuba they’ve got now, under Fidel. When he dies, Cuba’s going to be the same as everywhere. But if you go right now you’ll see some incredible poverty – the kinds of cars they drive! You really have to get on it, though – apparently Fidel is pretty ill.’

  COMPATRIOTS

  The woman had finished the practical component of her lecture, meanwhile, and travellers were starting to pose timid questions, though they weren’t asking what they should have been. At least that’s how it felt to me. I didn’t have the courage to say anything myself, though, so I went over to a nearby restaurant to have some coffee. Congregated at its entrance was a group of people who turned out to be talking to one another in my language. I looked them up and down suspiciously – they looked so like me. Yes, those women could have been my sisters. So I found myself a seat that was as far away from them as possible, then ordered coffee.

  I was far from pleased to be encountering compatriots in foreign lands. I pretended not to understand the sounds of my own language. I preferred to be anonymous. I watched them out of the corner of my eye and relished their unawareness of being understood. I observed them furtively, then disappeared.

  A tired British man wistfully confessed to me he felt the same (‘I’m far from pleased when I encounter my compatriots in foreign lands’) as he drank yet another beer, watching clientele coming into the restaurant. I chatted with him for a bit, but we didn’t really have that much to say to another.

  I finished my coffee and returned to where the lecture was, pretending I had to go soon, which I didn’t. I arrived in time for the last few discussions, as the determined lecturer woman was explaining something to the three listeners, those most enduring, gathered around her.

  TRAVEL PSYCHOLOGY: CONCLUSION

  ‘We have seen, ladies and gentlemen, how selfhood has grown and gained a foothold, become increasingly distinct and affecting. Previously barely marked, prone to being blurred, subjugated to the collective. Imprisoned in the stays of roles, conventions, flattened in the press of traditions, subjugated to demands. Now it swells and annexes the world.

  ‘Once the gods were external, unavailable, from another world, and their apparent emissaries were angels and demons. But the human ego burst forth and swept the gods up and inside, furnished them a place somewhere between the hippocampus and the brain stem, between the pineal gland and Broca’s area. Only in this way can the gods survive – in the dark, quiet nooks of the human body, in the crevices of the brain, in the empty space between the synapses. This fascinating phenomenon is beginning to be studied by the fledgling discipline of travel psychotheology.

  ‘This growing process is more and more powerful – influencin
g reality is equally what we have invented and what we have not. Who else moves in the real? We know people who travel to Morocco through Bertolucci’s film, to Dublin through Joyce, to Tibet through a film about the Dalai Lama.

  ‘There is a certain well-known syndrome named after Stendhal in which one arrives in a place known from literature or art and experiences it so intensely that one grows weak or faints. There are those who boast they have discovered places totally unknown, and then we envy them for experiencing the truest reality even very fleetingly before that place, like all the rest, is absorbed by our minds.

  ‘Which is why we must ask, once more, insistently, the same question: where are they going, to what countries, to what places? Other countries have become an external complex, a knot of significations that a good topographical psychologist can unravel just like that, interpret on the spot.

  ‘Our task is to bring to you the idea of practical travel psychology and to encourage you to take advantage of our services. Don’t be afraid, ladies and gentlemen, of those quiet corners by the coffee machines, around the duty-free shops, those ad-hoc offices where analysis takes place quickly, discreetly, only occasionally disrupted, perhaps, by departure announcements. It’s just two chairs behind a screen with maps on it.

  ‘“So, you’re going to Peru?” the topographical psychoanalyst might ask you. It would be easy to confuse him with a cashier or the person working check-in. “So, Peru?”’

  ‘And he’ll do a short associative test with you, attentively watching which of the words turns out to be the end of the thread. It’s a short-term analysis, without any superfluous dragging out of the topic, without invoking that old holy grail of the mothers and fathers to blame. Over a single session we ought to be able to get it.

  ‘Peru, but to what end?’

  THE TONGUE IS THE STRONGEST MUSCLE

  There are countries out there where people speak English. But not like us – we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It’s hard to imagine, but English is their real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don’t have anything to fall back on or to turn to in moments of doubt.

  How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lyrics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures – even the buttons in the lift! – are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths. They must have to write things down in special codes. Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them – they are accessible to everyone and everything! I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own, one of those dead ones no one else is using anyway, just so that for once they can have something just for themselves.

  SPEAK! SPEAK!

  Inside and out, to oneself and to others, narrating every situation, naming every state; search for words, try them on, that shoe that will magically transform Cinderella into a princess. Move words around like the chips you place on numbers in roulette. Perhaps this will be the time? Perhaps we’ll win this one?

  Speak, grab people’s sleeves, have them sit down across from us and listen. Then turn yourself into the listener for their ‘speak, speak’. Hasn’t it been said that I speak, therefore I am? One speaks, therefore one is?

  Use all possible means for this, metaphors, parables, wavers, unfinished sentences; don’t be put off by the sentence breaking off halfway through, as though past the verb there suddenly yawned an abyss.

  Do not leave any unexplained, unnarrated situations, any closed doors; kick them down with a curse, even the ones that lead to embarrassing and shameful hallways you would prefer to forget. Don’t be ashamed of any fall, of any sin. The narrated sin will be forgiven. The narrated life, saved. Is it not this that Saints Sigismund, Charles and James have taught us? He who has not mastered the art of speaking shall remain forever caught in a trap.

  FROG AND BIRD

  There are two points of view in the world: the frog’s perspective and bird’s eye view. Any point in between just leads to chaos.

  Take the airport maps so beautifully drawn on airline brochures. Their meaning becomes clear only once one sees them from above, like the monumental Nazca Lines, created with flying creatures in mind – the modern airport in Sydney is shaped like an airplane, for example. A somewhat uninteresting, I find, concept – your plane landing on a plane. The way becomes the goal, and the instrument the result. The airport in Tokyo, on the other hand, in the shape of an enormous hieroglyphic, is perplexing. What sort of letter is it? We haven’t mastered the Japanese alphabet, we won’t know what our arrival means, with what word they greet us here. What do they stamp into our passport? A big question mark?

  Similarly, Chinese airports bring to mind the local alphabet, you have to learn them, put them in order, create an anagram out of them – then perhaps they will reveal some unexpected wisdom of the journey. Or treat them like those sixty-four hexagrams from I Ching and then every landing will be a fortune. Hexagram 40. Xiè. Deliverance. Hexagram 36. Míng yí. Darkening of the Light. Hexagram 10. Lǚ. Treading. 17. Suí. Following. 24. Fù. Return. 30. Lí. Clinging.

  But let’s give it a rest with this convoluted Eastern metaphysics, for which, apparently, we have a soft spot. Let us look at the airport in San Francisco, and now we have something familiar, something that inspires confidence, that makes us feel right at home: here we have a cross section of the spine. The round centre of the airport is the spinal cord, locked in a hard safe shell of individual ribs, and here, radiating out, the nerve roots from which depart the numbered gates, each complete with a sleeve leading to the plane.

  And Frankfurt? That great air travel hub, that state within a state? What do you associate that with? Yes, yes, the spitting image of a chip, a computer chip, a razor-thin plate. Here there can be no doubts – they tell us what we are, dear travellers. We are the individual nerve impulses of the world, fractions of an instant, barely that part of it that permits the change from plus to minus, or maybe the other way around, and keeps everything in constant flux.

  LINES, PLANES AND BODIES

  I often dreamed of watching without being seen. Of spying. Of being the perfect observer. Like that camera obscura I once made out of a shoebox. It photographed for me a part of the world through a black closed space with a microscopic pupil through which light sneaks inside. I was training.

  The best place for this kind of training is Holland where people, convinced of their utter innocence, do not use curtains. After dusk the windows turn into little stages on which actors act out their evenings. Sequences of images bathed in yellow, warm light are the individual acts of the same production entitled ‘Life’. Dutch painting. Moving lives.

  Here at the door appears a man, in his hand he has a tray, he puts it on the table; two children and a woman sit down around it. They take their time eating, in silence, because the audio in this theatre doesn’t work. Then they move to the couch, watch a glowing screen attentively, but for me, standing on the street, it isn’t clear what has absorbed them so – I only see flickers, flutterings of light, tiny pictures, too brief and distant to be intelligible. Someone’s face, a mouth moving intensely, a landscape, another face… Some say that this is a boring play and that nothing happens in it. But I like it – for example the movement of a foot playing unconsciously with a slipper, or the whole astonishing act of yawning. Or a hand that seeks upon a plush surface a remote control and – having found it – is calmed, withers.

  Standing off to one side. Seeing only the world in fragments, there won’t be any other one. Moments, crumbs, fleeting configurations – no sooner have they come into existence than they fall to pieces. Life? There’s no such thing; I see lines, planes and bodies, and their transformations in time. Time, meanwhile, seems a simple instrument for the measurement of tiny changes, a school ruler
with a simplified scale – it’s just three points: was, is and will be.

  THE ACHILLES TENDON

  1542 was the dawn of a new era although unfortunately no one so much as noticed. It wasn’t a big year, nor the end of a century – from the perspective of numerology, there was nothing there, just the number three. And yet that year the first chapters of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and the entirety of De Humani corporis fabrica by Vesalius appeared.

  Needless to say, neither book contained everything – but can anything ever contain everything? Copernicus was missing the rest of the Solar System, planets like Uranus, which was still waiting for the right time to be discovered, on the eve of the French Revolution. Vesalius, meanwhile, lacked a number of specific mechanical solutions in the human body, spans, joints, connections – such as, to give just one example, the tendon that joins the calf to the heel.

  But maps of the world, of this internal and that external world, had already been drawn up, and that order, once glimpsed, irradiated the mind, etching into it the primary – the fundamental – lines and planes.

  Let’s say it is the warm November of 1689, some time in the afternoon. Filip Verheyen is doing what he usually does, sitting at the table, in the pool of light that flows in through the window, as though specially projected for this very purpose. He examines tissues arrayed over the table’s surface. Pins driven into the wood keep grey nerves in place. With his right hand, without looking at the paper, he sketches what he sees.

  Seeing, after all, means knowing.

  But now there’s someone banging on the door, and the dog’s barking ferociously, and Filip must get up. He is reluctant. His body has already adopted its favourite position, his head inclined over the specimen; now he must lean on his intact leg and drag out from beneath the table the leg that exists as a wooden peg. Limping, he goes to the door, where he manages to calm the dog down. At the door stands a young man whom Verheyen recognizes – but only after a considerable pause – as his student, Willem van Horssen. He’s hardly pleased by these visits, though no visit would please him, but still he takes a step backwards, his wooden leg tapping at the stone slabs of the entrance, and he invites his guest inside.